50 Pfennig

Tilsit notgeld from 1921 places this squarely in the second wave of German municipal emergency currency — after the acute postwar coin shortage of 1917–1920 but before hyperinflation rendered small-denomination paper meaningless by late 1922. By 1921, many towns were issuing notgeld as much for collector revenue as genuine necessity, a practice the Reichsbank actively discouraged but couldn't effectively stop.

Tilsit itself was by then the administrative center of Memelland, a territory detached from Germany under the Versailles settlement and placed under French administration in 1920 — a politically raw situation that gave local civic institutions like the Magistrat unusual prominence in daily economic life.